The present invention relates to a total karaoke system composed of a playback karaoke equipment and a synthetic karaoke equipment.
A karaoke apparatus is constructed such as to produce an instrumental accompaniment part of a requested song, which is concurrently mixed with a live vocal part of the same song picked up by a microphone. The karaoke apparatus becomes popular, and is installed not only in a bar and a club, but also in a specialized rental room called "karaoke box" and a vehicle such as a tourist bus. The conventional karaoke apparatus is normally a playback type or a musical tone reproduction type composed of a record unit for recording analog or digital audio information (i.e., music accompaniment data) and associated video information of karaoke songs, an audio unit for reproducing the karaoke song and mixing a singing voice therewith, a video unit for displaying background pictures and word characters along with the reproduction of the karaoke song, and a control unit for controlling these of the record, audio and video units. Recently, another karaoke apparatus of a synthetic type or a musical tone generating type is developed, which contains a tone generator for synthesizing musical tones according to a song data prescriptive of the karaoke song (i.e., musical performance designation data). Generally, the synthetic karaoke apparatus is connected through a communication network to a host station for retrieving therefrom the song data.
The playback karaoke apparatus has the record unit which is a closed or isolated data source, hence the playback karaoke apparatus cannot respond to a request for a non-entry karaoke song which is not stored in the record unit. On the other hand, the synthetic karaoke apparatus can access a database of the host station to freely retrieve therefrom a desired song data in response to a singer's request. An extreme type of the synthetic karaoke apparatus is solely dependent on the data telecommunication such that all the requested song data are supplied from the host station without exception. In order to save data communication cost and time required for repeated access to the host station upon every request, a semi-self-support type of the synthetic karaoke apparatus has a storage defining an open data source for stocking the song data supplied from the host station for re-use.